Category: Finished Works

This part is 3mins 10 secs the whole piece is 48 minute or so… I love the whole piece because of it emotional range and it’s story. The piece was writen in a concentration camp for POWs in France during WWII. for the only 4 instruments available – piano, violin, cello and clarinet. It was first played to prisoner in January 1942 on a very cold day. To me it’s classical punk because of it’s use of rhythm, chord and dischords and melody to represent the emotions of the prisoners and the spirit needed to survive the horror of the place it was written. This first part is just beautiful birds singing and yet has a lot of tension in it. I will come back to this piece again and again. I learn so much from this and there is more to learn.

For this I was inspired by Messiaen’s own writing about this movement – “Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven”

It’s for a poem “who will I be” about the anxiety I face meeting other men. It was inspired by women talking about their feelings when meeting strangers, specifically men. The thing that is scary and that seems overlooked is that actually the vast majority of men in the west (at least) are very polite to women they don’t know and that women should be more worried about men they know, than strangers. While for men violence is more likely to come from strangers. In both cases alcohol is most likely to be involved, though ‘Ice’ seems to be becoming a more common contributor, but still no where near as dangerous as alcohol or as expensive to our economy. Interestingly most of the other illegal drugs only contribute to violence as a result of their illegality, because it pushes people to associate with criminals.

The majority of violence in the world is between men. It doesn’t get reported because it is so natural as to be invisible. It only gets noticed when the violence is “dishonourable” that is an ambush punch, or the victim is considered weaker. This is the same source of the shaming that goes on with domestic violence and rape. The other types of violence, or maybe part of violence that gets notices is when there is no consent. “Combatants”, that is soldiers, are consenting participants in violence while “civilian” men, and automatically children and women haven’t consented to participate in the “war”, the most extreme violence. This is a common theme of my poetry, and other writing. There will be more on this site.

This site will be a place for me to show explorations, experiments, works in progress (WIP), finished creative works. If I can say it out loud I’m a polymath.

I sometimes hate, but always finds it hard to to be stick to genres, techniques, subjects but I do try to live by an ethical code and philosophy, that of exploration, seeking meaning and understanding, being respectful of others and creativity.

I write, I draw, I paint, I make videos, I make sounds, some of it traditional and some digital. I sit around thinking and feeling and celebrating.

My subjects are sex, politics, violence, philosophy (in the sense of asking who am I, how do I know what I know, how/why do I behave the way I do), everyday crap, and sometimes I have nothing to say at all I’m just playing.